Virtually everyone in Malaysia pwned in telco, govt data hack spree

46.2 million stolen accounts, thousands of medical records put up for sale by crooks

The personal data of millions of Malaysians has been swiped by hackers who raided government servers and databases at a dozen telcos in the southeast Asia nation.

Information on 46.2 million cellphone accounts was slurped from Malaysians telecoms providers. To put that in context, the population of Malaysia is 31.2 million; obviously, some people have more than one number.

The stolen telco records include people's mobile phone numbers, SIM card details, device serial numbers, and home addresses, all of which are useful to identity thieves and scammers. Some 80,000 medical records were also accessed during the hacking spree, and government websites as well as Jobstreet.com were attacked and infiltrated, too, we're told.

The Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission, along with the police, are probing the computer security breaches. DiGi.Com and Celcom Axiata are among the dozen compromised telcos assisting investigators.

The intrusions were first reported by Malaysian news site lowyat.net, which spotted, in the middle of last month, a mystery scumbag trying to flog the stolen data for Bitcoins.

Malaysian officials confirmed this week that nearly 50 million mobile phone account records were accessed by hackers unknown. The authorities also warned that people's private data was stolen from the Malaysian Medical Council, the Malaysian Medical Association, the Academy of Medicine, the Malaysian Housing Loan Applications body, the Malaysian Dental Association, and the National Specialist Register of Malaysia.

It's believed the systems were actually hacked as far back as 2014, The Star reported.

Incredible as it may seem there’s at least a couple of precedents for a huge chunk of the population of an entire country getting caught up in a database security breach. The personal records of millions of folks in South Africa spilled online only last month. Almost everyone who had a credit card in South Korea was pwned back in 2014 in another unedifying security cockup. ®